Thread by @faisalislam

“Get Covid & live longer” was quote in message obtained by my colleague @bbclaurak - difficult to know what that means but worth attempting to unpack. surely not an attempt at humour?

Suggesting connection between “getting COVID” and “living longer” is obviously innumerate…

Innumerate because:

Life expectancy is a mean, not a median - this makes a significant difference.

Life expectancy at 80 years old now, is 9 more years for a man, 10 for a woman...

More here from actual actuaries:

covid-arg.com/post/get-covid…

But actually the eyebrow raising thing here is suggesting some sort of causal relationship, even if Covid fatality average age was definitively below life expectancy... many other factors, for example, might have been certain age groups were almost totally shielded from infection

Context: time message sent (Oct 15) Starmer called for circuit breaker 2 days before, anti-lockdown Great BArrington Declaration made week before/ taken up in papers... eg average Covid death age v life expectancy comparison bold Mail headline week before dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…

Source for 82.4 years average is CEBM / Oxf uni report tweekend before, so that is accurate...

Reference (joke?) to Covid extending life, was made publicly by anti lockdown campaigner Simon Dolan “prolongs life” day before, and comic Lee Hurst the week before “live longer”...

Why does this matter? Because the economy used as the central argument for delaying the Autumn lockdown and then proceeding with “saving Christmas”… but such was the wave of deaths and cases, that the economy had to be locked down anyway… no direct straight forward trade off…